What I truly love about Samarrai’s writing is the brilliant dislodging of epochs and people, eruditional toying with the documented and the fictitious, the unpredictability, the lavish fancy and terrific dialogues. One should not be Tagore to enter the Garden of her worlds and labyrinths, where Mozart and Trier meet, Wagner and Bach, or rather Bachs. With Samarrai time and space are toys, an occasional means but never an end, rather a limbo where they, in fact, do not exist. In her necropolis living people dwell, , while the dead or undead roam the city streets, and those dislodgings seem quite convincing, realistic, even logical. This writing and Samarrai as the author both deserve a far bigger readership, for the fate of the poem-the verse-the tale is not to be silent nor is it the fate of great authors to be unmentioned.

Satire is a defense of the intelligent from the primitivism of the dumb. “Crodocile” is a poem which could be part of elementary school textbooks. It has a merry Ionian scale rhythm, I kept hearing the piano while reading it, occasionally trying to imagine it accompanied by sounds of acoustic guitars and, as a throwback to my childhood, the voice of Branko Kockica. Also, the poem, especially in its final verses, can of course be – though this is optional, of course – a reference to, as it is now popular and not all too politically correct to say, the influx of refugees, or rather migrants, into Europe. But this is not the end of it: “Crocodile” is also a poem of protest, engaged literature, a reflection of the author’s social consciousness and her view of society and the system, both here and in other parts of the globe. Still, she has a specific deal with the Crocodile, and she herself, as the verse puts it, is a Crocophile, meaning she knows all about the Crocodiles and other newcomers to Belgrade and Serbia, perhaps more than she is willing to share. Whether the Nile delta, Guatemala or tiny Serbia will be the house of crocodiles, whales and other magnificent creatures who truly sleep with their eyes beyond all evil, we might learn in the continuation of the poem or in the poetic cycle with this central topic, for the author, despite her minimal experience with rhyme [Paryse, Londyne…] feels at home with this style and with her lucidness and verse-laden engagement, the recommendation presents itself, meaning that, speaking in sports’ terms, the A-team stays the same.

A review of the short story ‘The Bitch’THE POETRY Leila Samarrai is an exceptional poetess. Hence why the lyricism is so excellent in her works. Consciously or not, whatever the case might be, ultimately it is irrelevant, the verses flow from her sleeves, fingertips, quill, making up a powerful waterfall of verses which floods us readers, therefore we, occasionally, while disappearing into the colors and verses of Samarrai, get the impression that we are reading a poem, a poem that akin to sound (of whistling) gets stuck in one’s throat.THE PLAYS I have had the honor of reading Samarrai’s plays. Perhaps some would call me subjective on this, but her plays are equally as good as her poetry. What’s more, Samarrai’s poetry and plays often are intertwined, making up an antique literary fatherland. Samarrai’s erudition mixed with imagination creates and destroys worlds and universes, leading us through epochs and vast spaces as if in a dream, or rather, in a moment. Is ‘The Bitch’ a type of play? Very much so. This story yearns for an adaptation, and it might happen if an open and ingenious enough person reads it and feels its bark or voice as an invitation for casting of a role of roles.THE FARCE Speaking of playwrights, farce is the one thing that must not be avoided in Samarrai’s works. However you identify with her protagonists of either sex, with their realistic – and in a way our own, too – basic and easily recognizable problems, we are left with the other side of Janus’ face, partly smiling, partly grim. It is enjoyable to wander around the light and darkness of Leila Samarrai. Her humor can also be quite vocal, with many a hahaha within, and it can also, in the blink of an eye, turn itself into a very sharp and even shredding satire of human and less-so characters. Samarrai is what Branislav Nušić could have been had he ever wanted to dabble in horror.THE ABSURDITY Mentioning Samarrai’s works, and glossing over the absurdist tinge of it, would religiously speaking be blasphemous. Even though it seems easy to write of absurdist literature or to write absurdist literature itself, I would disagree that everyone can do it with a little bit of imagination packed into the zeitgeist. Samarrai’s absurdist tendencies are not there for absurdity’s sake, nor does it adorn itself with it, spraying it all over the letters, nor amateurishly summon it like the Dodolas summon the rain. The absurdity is there, it materializes on its own, popping out of the situation, has a face and form of engaged literature, it is strong and loud, it chides and accuses, it awakens and sobers…COURAGE Leila Samarrai is without a doubt a courageous person. I will not go into the minutiae nor explain why I think so. It will be enough for you to take one of her works, read it from start to finish, and it will all be clear. Without literary courage, there is no literary quality, or rather, it remains unfinished and silent, which in literature is a death worse than death.METEMPSYCHOSES AND METAMORPHOSES IN ‘THE BITCH’ All of these characters might in a Borgesian, Alephian way, all be one. Peter is Ana and is Pipi and Fifi, and…The whole work itself. And not just him, but each of them separately. Dismantling, rearranging and transforming of characters is in particular a great treat of this all-encompassing work. For instance, Pipi is 2×3.14! An amazing solution out of which Pipi becomes Lazarus who is raised back from the dead. Also, the amazing ‘woof woof’ ending, with its greeting or saying goodbye, stultifies any character division to humans and animals, men and women, protagonists and antagonists. A top notch work of fiction alongside which you grow and learn.https://www.limundo.com/…/I-lud-i-zbunjen-aforizmi…/54762727

Review, Nataša Mačukat, professor of German language and literature
Upon reading ‘The Adventures of Boris K.’ my first impression was – a novel came out fit for its time of publication, in an ocean of new well-renowned works of fiction, completely anachronistic, more often than not imitating the romantic form and expression. A novel that discovered new in a completely natural manner, without the forced and assembly-line experimenting, in an age where ‘nobody believes in the virginal literatures anymore’, it simply materialized itself out of the spirit of the 21st century.
Other than alluding to Kafka in its very title, ‘The Adventures of Boris K.’ can remind the reader of E.T.A. Hoffmann , the German romantic author who was at least two centuries ahead of his time, with its elements of fantasy and the bizarre, or of Gustav Meyrink with its specific type of horror. In a broader thematic context the novel takes place in a setting where literature has long stopped being Arcadian due to being overladen with historicity and had also long and in the widest range possible started to deal with the relationship of the individual with society – in Central Europe.
The subject matter of the novel is Serbia in her transitional age, without mentioning this specifically, but can be understood in a far broader context. Obviously a work of satire, but avoiding that which satire has become today – institutionalized, watered down, overly present, and cynically and arrogantly used by those whom it should by definition be targeting, because they cannot be touched, and it creates the illusion of democracy.
Boris K. is represented best as a video game character – without much character he goes to different ‘missions.’ With his facelessness, one moment overly and nigh-drunkenly involved and another barely mildly so, adding the bizarre nature of the missions, he describes all of us people of today – forced to adapt to various roles with the purpose of maintaining an existence, most assuredly losing our way and accepting worthless roles and habits, we lose our essential self.